On my way to work this morning I was pondering the notion of Googlability. I’m quite lucky that both of my names are spelled in odd ways, it means that there aren’t that many Iain Tait‘s out there. Apart from Dr Iain Tait at the University of Dundee with whom I have an ongoing battle for the top Google Spot – note: I’m not linking to him as it’ll just bump up his Google ranking ;-)
But it led me to a thought. As more and more people have bits of themselves online having a good solid Googlable name actually becomes a valuable asset. Being called John Smith (or any international equivalent) actually means that you’ll have to get into serious search engine optimisation in order for people to find you.
So, next time you’re naming a child, think about it.
Especially if you’ve got a common surname…
Quite right!
We named our kid Erel, which (like my name) has the virtue of being short and uncommon. It also (like my name) has the disadvantage of sounding similar to a more common name, so will often be misspelled. I haven’t set up a website for him (yet), so I don’t know how quickly he’ll gather up the google juice.